May 11th A new week and it started with another very lazy day, in fact we had zero kilometres walking today. In the morning Huan had her singing class but yours truly had to stay home and wait for the freezer repair man. You may remember back in January we had a new auto-defrost unit fitted, guaranteed for three months. Last night there was a large sheet of ice in the bottom of the freezer again! When the technician arrived he took the panels off in the back of the freezer and then proceeded to bash a screwdriver through the drain hole! At least he didn’t charge us any labour costs. Huan saw him as he was leaving and he told her to call again whenever we needed but that there was not much more he could do and we would probably need a new fridge-freezer if the problem recurred too often. A quick Google shows that today’s fridge-freezers should last anything from ten to twenty years, ours is approaching six!
Being a Tuesday I was of course the duty chef again so no afternoon walk either. Today I chose a recipe that could well have been written by my eldest brother, around 650 years ago. It’s called “Medieval Funge”. I must admit to cheating and adding a little sliced garlic and pepper sausage to my bowl.
Here is Huan’s bowl, posed as
near as the recipe picture as I could. The colours are not the same, perhaps
the mushrooms were different. I would suggest trying with different types of
mushrooms, we used two. Our bread was steamed Chinese bread, it went well with
the soup, both of us were happy with it and I would recommend it.
I had planned to make up for my
laziness with an evening walk but ended up staying in again, this time waiting
for Taobao. Because we are not going to
What were the cheeses like? They
weren’t as hard as we would have liked but beggars can’t be choosers so into
the fridge they went. They took less than forty eight hours to arrive but I
would hazard a guess that they came from Sanya to Wuzhishan in a
non-refrigerated truck. You might be surprised to know that what you see below
only cost us ¥113.00, much cheaper than either
May 12th Hulusi practice for Huan this morning and an early start for me. I
was out just after half past seven and planned a fairly long walk up the
We seriously considered selling our Sanya property and perhaps buying one of these. That is until we found out how expensive they were (¥8,000,000.00) and that no title deeds were available. The second time we went in we made a video, you can find that here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaW431gYxbA&list=PLrm74YBD3qG5hMSefKtpaGIH2okgNoBLN&index=56&ab_channel=UncleBob
Before long I was on the main road where I found my first wee beastie.
Before long I came across another wee beastie, Huan was definitely going to be upset. For this one I could get very close, in fact any closer and I would have gone over the crash barrier and taken the little fellow down the hill with me. Here are his left and right profiles.
It’s a pleasant walk, at least until you go too far. My plan was to walk for two hours before turning back, the ‘going’ is all like this but don’t let the photos fool you; it’s uphill all the way.
What would life be without bumping into bovine friends now and then? At least in the daytime you can see them, we almost hit one before driving at night time. They were all lying down before I turned up and despite me crossing the road so as not to disturb them that were still a bit wary. I didn’t fancy creating a traffic accident so went past without stopping for a chat.
Here I am at the 205km marker,
not that I had walked that far of course. This is one of the markers showing
the distance from
This is what Wuzhishan looks like from that point; it doesn’t look like eight kilometres does it. Mind you, there are lots of bends on the road.
Going downhill was a little
easier than going up although my new boots didn’t feel so good. I think we may
have bought a size too big. Not many more photos were taken but I did spot some
flowers that we haven’t seen before.
When I arrived home I was tired and thirsty and sweating like a sinner in church. (I just found that one; I wanted a variation to the more usual ones.) What was my distance and time? Up and down came to 16.2kms, up took me two hours and down one hour and forty four minutes. That was good enough for me! After lunch I most definitely needed a nap but surprisingly, for me anyway, 30 minutes was enough. A lazy rest of the day followed.
May 13th Huan was free today so it was a joint walk and I let her choose. Her choice was the countryside, past the mansions on the hill, so I agreed with one proviso. We would walk up the ‘shaded’ road to the mansions and not downriver and up the steps at the end. First off we spotted some new construction on our dam, we think this may be the site of a building to control the two sluice gates in the centre when it’s eventually finished.
Our route took us along the irrigation canal which, as you can see, is not doing much irrigating at the moment. It should be back to normal in a few weeks when they have finished constructing the new portion at the end of the bridge to nowhere.
Despite there being no water the allotments at the mansion on the hill are still managing to grow some stuff. Some of them are dying, maybe the owners have gone back up north, but some are still managing to get water from somewhere. Here’s one growing eggplants.
Normally we would head past my bovine buddies back towards civilization but today Huan fancied a stroll down to the river, passing the lovely scenery on the way and the highway in the distance. We have lots of memories messing about underneath those supports you can see, mostly trying to find ways to walk down at river level.
Towards the bottom was a
smallholding with the usual chickens and ducks along with empty pigpens. To
Huan’s delight there was also a turkey today. Don’t ask me why she likes
turkeys so much, I have no idea. This one was not only preening but following
us, or me, everywhere. Huan asked the farmer where the ‘lady bird’ was and he
told her she was somewhere looking after eggs. I guess turkeys also go through
all the strutting stuff when they are protecting their mates.
Did we reach the river? Yes. Did we walk anywhere on it or near it? No. From experience we already knew we would have to backtrack up the hill which luckily, was nearly all in the shade!
Passing my bovine buddies I did the usual think of ‘mooing’ and just as I expected, a little head popped up over the wall. As usual I went to the gate and had a chat but no photos were taken there so there’s just Kilroy for you to see.
Huan didn’t fancy a long walk so we headed towards home where I fully intended to drop her off and keep going. As it happened, I changed my mind too so no ten kilometres today. That pleased Huan because she thought I would have been too tired to cook today’s dinner! Lunch was cheese sandwiches with some of that lovely stuff you saw above, yummy. My neck was again doing its impression of a nodding donkey after lunch so a nap was needed, for both of us.
After our nap and a short coffee break I got stuck into the recipe. You may notice it includes pearl barley. Since we had to order so much I searched for recipes that included it.
As is often the case some
modifications were needed. The first one was not needed, but decided by us,
swap the green beans for ‘garlic legs’. That’s our name for garlic shoots and
we both like them, in fact I much prefer them to green beans any day. Next we
couldn’t find flaked almonds so some normal ones were used sliced, after a
fashion. It carries on, no red wine vinegar so I used red wine and a teaspoon
of alcoholic vinegar! There was no
Laziness set in then and the extra short walk I had planned for after dinner fell by the wayside. Huan was happy; it gave her more time to besiege my ears! I just watched movies, wrote this and did some more Chinese. If you’re wondering what happened to my guitar practicing, my wrist is playing up again so I have to keep it to very little and not very often.
May 14th What a day! Last night I cleared my Chrome history which of course signs you out of everything. I thought nothing about it and we headed off to the dentist early this morning. Here I am sat waiting for the dentist to start.
Off to the supermarket then to buy some oats for the weekend’s cooking. These items on the shelves amused me.
The Snickers bars in the second photo must be specifically for the Chinese or Asian markets. The top one has sweet potato added and the bottom one black rice. I think I would prefer to stick with the original recipe thank you!
Once home I switched on the computer and began logging on to my closed programs. All were fine with the exception of Facebook for which I had two factor authentication enabled. In the past this has been no problem whatsoever, enter my password then retrieve the six digit code from my phone et voila, I’d be in. Today, for some reason, I wasn’t receiving any SMS codes from FB. After hours of internet searching, password changes, and repeated attempts I was met with this. The worrying thing is many people seem to have the same problem and there is no way to contact FB to sort it out. I even tried creating a new account to which I was rebuked for violating the community guidelines by opening more than one account! We’ll have to wait and see what happens tomorrow, I may have to open a new account in Huan’s name.
Finally I thought I would try with the laptop, I have been signed in from there before, maybe in that way I could succeed. Would you believe it, another problem surfaced, the laptop would not turn on. We haven’t used it since March so I guess the battery could have gone flat but even after hours of charging it wouldn’t work. Huan talked to the Taobao shop who asked for a photo of the problem, what they expected to see I don’t know.
They did agree that we could send it back to them for repair but we would have to pay the shipping costs both ways. Now we are worried about any sensitive information that may be on it so are unsure whether to send it or to try and fix it locally. Now we have something else to think about when Huan comes back from her class tomorrow. These things are sent to try us I suppose. I spent the evening watching movies!
May 15th Singing class for Huan and market day for me, but I did walk Huan to school first. On the way she insisted I take these two photographs of ‘wee beasties’. She helped the green one by putting in a tree where it promptly fell to the ground where she couldn’t reach it. The snail was left to finish its own way across the road.
Before we got out of the gate we came across a scene from last of the summer wine, three old men playing games. Well they weren’t really playing games they were trying to get coconuts down from the tree. I suggested they climb to which they replied that they were too old, would I climb up there instead. I did my best impression of ‘Truly of the Yard’ or maybe is was ‘Foggy’. The first coconut bounced miles out of the net, the next two that we saw were caught well. Here’s the ‘gang’ at work and a screenshot of one of the successful drops.
After dropping Huan off I did my thing and managed to get my ten kilometres in for the day. Not many more photos were taken mind you, I think I was preoccupied with my Facebook problems. I did spot these two love birds though.
After lunch we had a trip to the local Kuà idì shop, (Express Delivery) and sent the laptop off. Hopefully all will be well within a week or two.
Being a Saturday I bet you are wondering what I cooked for dinner this weekend aren’t you? I didn’t cook dinner, instead I cooked pudding, it’s enough that we don’t need anything before it. I tried to find out where I got this recipe from, without success, so I am unable to cite my sources.
Our ingredients were slightly different, Chinese pears are always a little too hard so we substituted pineapple instead. We also added passion fruit, the one that has red flesh. Apart from our crumble not sticking together as much as I thought it should have, it worked out very well. We had it hot today, with ice cream, we’ll have it cold tomorrow, more than likely with ice cream again. There goes my cholesterol this week!
With my FB still not working I was reduced to watching movies in the evening while Huan had her usual trip downstairs to meet the ladies for hulusi practice.
May 16th Today we decided to go and look for the ‘park’ that two old men, (not sitting on a park bench), had mentioned to us before, April 4th to be precise. They told us it would be about a kilometre or two further up the hill. Here’s the turn off from the Sanya road.
And here’s the route we followed and the turn-off that would lead us to the park, we had to cross the bridge and then take the right fork, the left was only dirt track heading downhill.
This is where the difference in terminology sets in between us Brits and the Chinese. We eventually realised that there is no park to speak of although there is a nice walk up the hill. Why couldn’t they just tell us that in the first place?
At the end of our nice walk we came to this, the end of the hard road and a farm.
The farm turned out to be more of a smallholding that the tenants were renting on a yearly basis, with not a lot of room inside but I guess enough for six families to each have a chicken shed and grow a handful of crops.
Nothing else really grabbed our interest until we arrived back in town where we spotted this. For some reason the nurses are not allowed to have food delivered at the front gate, maybe the college prefers them to eat in a canteen. Whatever, the enterprising young ladies find a way around the rules and get their deliveries anyway.
Our distance was pretty good today, fourteen and a half kilometres, had we continued up the hill we would have reached sixteen. However, when I got home I discovered I had the ‘Disney Rash’ on the backs of my legs so probably just as well we didn’t go any further. What do you mean you’ve never heard of the ‘Disney Rash’? It’s real, just Google it. Only one of us had problems staying awake after lunch and had to have a little kip, me! While I was snoring Huan received another hulusi from Taobao, this one in the key of ‘C’, her original is in Bb. It seems they will be playing both later this year.
Before dinner Huan was already off to another express delivery company to return the hulusi she just bought, it sounded terrible and not due to her playing. One of these days she may learn that buying cheap is not worth it and what’s more is often false economy. I won’t hold my breath though! Dinner was of course the remaining pudding left over from yesterday, cold this time but still with ice cream. It will definitely appear in our future diets, although I will have to try and find out why the crumble didn’t stick together as I expected it to.
More movies for me, I didn’t even attempt logging into FB today, I want to make sure I pass well over the twenty four hour mark before I try again.
May 17th Monday morning, reset all cookies, twenty fours is long gone, tried entering the magic realms of Facebook again, and as I’m sure you expected, failed miserably again. About the only thing of use that I did was sign a petition on change.org “Facebook it's time for you to have customer service that doesn't suck.” I guess Mark Zuckerberg feels that us mere mortals who pay nothing to use his portal deserve nothing to help us if we have problems.
Other than that I spent the day shopping with Huan and cooking alone. Yes, I know that it’s not Tuesday but we have a different schedule this week. I have no recipe for today’s dinner; it came from somewhere within my cranium, not sure where. The ingredients were chicken breast, red and yellow peppers, celery, mushrooms, onions, garlic and a little parsley. Once all that was sufficiently cooked some yoghurt was added followed by some flat noodles. Here’s Huan’s dish, mine wasn’t so presentable, and I also had some parmesan cheese.
I did find a nice little treasure on Youtube this afternoon, something I had neither heard of nor seen before. It comes from the BBC in 1994, under the title of ‘Eccentric British Comedies’ and it’s an English mini-series called ‘Love On A Branch Line’. If you like old style British TV then it’s definitely worth searching it out.
After dinner I decided a walk was in order even though we don’t usually have one on a Monday. Huan declined to accompany me which was probably just as well. My solo walk was quite ‘windy’ and even a little ‘aromatic’ if you know what I mean. I couldn’t even blame it on Huan’s cooking! Where I was going I had no idea, I started off down by the river in front of the apartments, here are two views you may not have seen before.
It would be nice to walk right down alongside the river all the way upstream back into town but unfortunately, the sluice gates get in the way. I went that far just to show you the problem and then turned back to go up the steps on the right in the second photo.
I took a few ‘new detours’ to see if I could make ten kilometres, one of them led to this next scene. There was a ‘snowbird’ farmer there who told me there was no way to go through so I had to backtrack. He was wearing a face veil similar to those worn by beekeepers, he told me it was to keep the mosquitoes off!
Coming back over the furthest bridge I tried an ‘arty’ photo, more practice needed I think!
By the time I reached our place I had succeeded in doing the ten kilometres and I found Huan and Yu outside annoying the neighbours! Actually, Chinese people are far less likely to raise a fuss about neighbours singing and dancing unless it’s at a very inappropriate time.
I did try a last arty photo of the night sky but that was nowhere near good enough for your discerning eyes dear readers. I’m sure you’ll forgive me. Now it’s time to post this missive, I’m not sure how many of you will actually see it this week because of course I can’t share it on Facebook! These things are sent to try us. Bye for now, see you next time!
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